The Bell by Iris Murdoch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Interrupting Routine

I work as tutor and librarian at Blackfriars Hall Oxford, the smallest and most medieval of the University of Oxford colleges and also a Dominican priory. A few years ago Blackfriars acquired a bell to call the friars to prayer. The sound of the bell does indeed create a definite atmosphere in the place; as also does its timing since it rings, like its larger fellow at Christ Church College, according to solar time - about six minutes behind GMT. The midday call to the Angelus therefore is somewhat disconcerting for passers by who nervously check their watches. I have come to believe that this slight disruption, this interruption, is precisely the bell’s function, intended or not. Paradoxically: a routine that interrupts routine. One way to interpret Murdoch’s novel is as just such an interruption in the lives of its characters.

A.S. Byatt in her introduction calls The Bell Murdoch’s first ‘English’ novel. And it certainly creates a distinctive atmosphere, one so dense, thick, and humid in the Summer heat that it feels like green cotton wool - simultaneously inhibiting and cushioning movement. The characters, mostly middle class professionals, each might have ‘issues’; but all are nevertheless cradled in the social solidity of a 1950’s bourgeois English culture that hopes against hope that it will remain 1939 forever. They live in an existential routine that seems fixed; they are stuck... largely with themselves.

People ‘get on’ as if on a trajectory with the defined and relatively narrow limits of Oxbridge graduates in a post-war world they find alien and confusing. Their individual worries, however, don’t inhibit their confidence, material or spiritual, in being English. They are, of course, completely unaware of this. How could it be otherwise? But their Englishness is the necessarily unstated subject of the book. The narrator would only spoil the narrative if she gave the game away; introspection is not to be encouraged, “A belief in Original Sin should not lead us to probe the filth of our minds.” Irony is after all English group therapy.

Opening with a very civilised adultery, leading to an even more civilised reconciliation for which the outgoing lover provides transportation to the railway station, there is no conflict which can’t be solved if one just has the patience to wait it out. And for heavens sake keep one’s mouth shut. Intimate communication is far too perilous a venture. Much preferable to rely on one’s friends to buoy one up without making a fuss, usually with a little G&T, or possibly even a bit of evening Compline before bed.

The High Church tradition, the antithesis of her Irish Presbyterian background, is something Murdoch became intimately familiar with in Oxford. Her College, Somerville, is just past the end of St. Giles’, a street along which John Henry Newman started his career as an Anglican vicar at one end and wound up a Catholic Cardinal at the other. Halfway along, and touching Blackfriars, is Pusey House, named for Newman’s colleague in the liturgical revival of Anglicanism (the Oxford Movement in fact). Pusey House is often more Catholic than the local Catholic churches since it can both anticipate the introduction of new ritual or revert to ancient practices without consulting the Vatican (Pusey House also has the best collection of Vatican documents in Oxford).

Some consider High Anglicanism to be a mimicry of Catholicism. It’s not. It is true English Catholicism, or better said, Catholicism in the English mode. Many Oxford colleges conduct Evensong and Compline services daily during term, using English Plainsong or Gregorian chant according to preference. These are sensually pleasing, one might call them erotic, events. They employ all the smells and bells of Catholic ritual but also emit a vaguely camp rebelliousness - directed at both Low Church Anglicans as well as the straight-laced (historically Irish) Catholic masses.

This Anglo-Catholicism provides a great deal of the dark green, cotton wool, comfort of The Bell. The enclosed convent of Anglican nuns in Imber is not an antithesis to the repressed erotic desires of the characters who fetch up together across the lake in a half-derelict country pile of Imber Court; it is a spiritual celebration of the erotic (One is reminded of Teresa of Avila and her swooning for Christ, her Spouse). I know of at least three similar communities within 15 minutes drive of Oxford. And I lived in one of these while I wrote my doctoral dissertation.*

This kind of community is not a place to escape desire but a place in which desire can be explored in a way that is uniquely English: through patient ritual, agricultural and industrial as well as religious. As the medieval philosophers taught: through practice one can act one’s way into a moral life. “The great thing about a dog” says one of the residents “is that it can be trained to love you.” And not just dogs. Humans too can be taught to love trough practice; but not through conversation, idle or therapeutic. So, “Meals were taken in silence at Imber.”

In a sense, therefore, sex is as much a religious practice in Anglo-Catholicism as it is in the Buddhism of the Kama Sutra. It needn’t be advertised as such, that would require talk which would compromise the effort fatally. But Murdoch makes the equivalence explicit in her description of the psychic state of her main character, a homosexual: “...in some curious way the emotion which fed both [his religious feeling and homosexual orientation] arose deeply from the same source.”

English resourcefulness is to be found in this dance of sex and religion, which is carried out as much to the rhythm of an English country house as of a Benedictine convent. The mustiness of each is additive: “There was a stale smell, like the smell of old bread, the smell of an institution.” A concise summary really of the English Baroque. Everything is surface, but brightly lighted surface so that nothing is actually hidden, “All the electric lights were so bright at Imber.”

The inhabitants are essentially misfits, and are recruited as such, “people... who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely...” Each of these defective characters has a place, a duty really, in the overall choreography of an operatic ballet in Imber Court, a definite role that fits snugly into an overall ensemble.

Dora is the dim beauty, the soprano of the piece. She has no comprehension of religion and only the most instrumentally sterile view of sex; but she is not malicious, “That she had no memory made her generous.” She is a central figure, a sort of goddess of creation (and of course therefore sex), who tends to get lost in Murdoch’s narrative turbulence. Paul, Dora’s husband, is the operatic baritone, for whom neither sex nor religion is about passion but domesticity. He desires Dora as housekeeper and mother for his children; and religion is part of an ordered family bliss. His lust, such as it is, is paterfamilial and conventional not perverse.

The director/producer is Mrs. Mark (married to Mr. Mrs. Mark), a somewhat beefy person in long skirts, with “well-developed calves.” She is a type of English proto-hippie perhaps, an evangelical Mrs Danvers, living a life of gentile, procedural poverty on someone else’s dime, never without a ‘cause’. Without her, neither sex nor religion could flourish at Imber. She is the liturgical and social hub, the enforcer of strict adherence to the rubrics, “It’s not like a hotel and we do expect our guests to fit in – and I think that’s what they like best too,” she politely commands. She also ensures that conversation never becomes intrusive, “That’s another little religious rule that we try to follow. No gossip.” What takes place outside Imber, remains outside Imber.

Mrs. Mark is the agent of Michael Meade, the somewhat reluctant leader, whose family estate Imber Court is. In subsequent decades Michael would have been identified as the ‘cult leader’ of the residents, not as sinister as Jim Jones or as commercial as Werner Erhard perhaps but still of some unaccountably charismatic incompetence. Michael has been inspired by the Abbess of the Benedictine convent to ‘minister’ to folk who are neither clerical nor secular but what now might be called ‘seekers’. He is a homosexual.

Catherine is the mezzo-soprano and, innovatively, the prima ballerina of the piece who is immediately identified by Dora as a rival. Catherine is imminently to become a postulant in the convent; or, as her twin brother perceives the situation, to be swallowed alive by the institutional monster of religious passion. Toby, Catherine’s male sexual counterpart, is the the pious, virginal counter-tenor. He is the unsure novice, spiritually as well as sexually unformed.

The eponymous bell constitutes what Alfred Hitchcock called the McGuffin - a motivating force whose function is to set the narrative in motion but that remains invisible. Essential therefore, although apparently trivial. It is Dora and Toby, at ends of the sexual/spiritual spectrum, who release the bell from the primal waters in which it has been hidden. Driven by the ‘event’ of the bell, the characters carom around the confines of Imber Court, impelling each other to acts of spiritual lust and material folly in a marvellously English way. And of course interrupting their lives profoundly, not just for them but for all of Murdoch’s generation.


* In fact this form of Anglo-Catholic lay community was inspired by the so-called Distributist Movement of the 1920’s and 30’s. This was a Catholic attempt, promoted by the likes of GK Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, to find a ‘middle way’ between Capitalism and Communism. It’s ideal was a sort of medieval economy dominated by small agricultural producers who owned and worked their own land. A few of Distributism’s ideological remnants still exist in Britain, Canada and Australia.

View all my reviews